Graphic Design: Advertising Research Assignment (Ken Hey)

Advanced Searching - Multiple Keywords

Start out a list of keywords and synonyms you find in your assignment instructions or notes. As you skim lists of articles in the databases be on the look out for additional search terms (and ideas!) Keywords that are nouns work best.

Assignment Keywords 

• advertising, children's advertising
• impact
• children, child, youth, teen, tween, childhood
• effect
• consumerism, consumer, consumers
• jobs, careers, workplace
• awareness, public awareness, consumer awareness

Database Keyword Examples

• television, telecommunication, internet
• media, social media, digital media
• product, products, product placement
• influence, influencers

Using a database's Advanced Search boxes you can combine keywords that ask the database to find articles relating to the concepts of the combined words. For example, an Advanced Search using EBSCO databases.

EBSCO Database Filters

The Advanced Search - advertising AND children - is still fairly general. It produced nearly 90,000 results, but by applying the filters in the left column, I reduced that number just over 10,000 in a matter of seconds.

You can further filter by Source Type - Academic Journals, Magazines, or Newspapers. The number in parenthesis next to the Source Types indicates the number of articles in each category.

Examples: Search Results - News, Magazines, Academic Journals

Notice the difference in the perspectives for each articles. In addition, you can see that news articles are shortest, magazine articles are a little longer, and articles from academic journals are quite long and detailed. You do NOT have to read every single word in every article. Skim or scan the article for information you can use for your project, even if it's only a few sentences!

• Use the Abstract (summary) to determine whether the article is useful to you. If it is continue on to read the full text of the article.
• Notice the list of Subjects above the Abstract. These can be used as keywords in further searches or direct links to related articles.
• Read the article by clicking on the PDF Full Text icon on the left.
• Keep track of your articles by use the Permalink or Email Tools.
  • In EBSCO the page link is called Permalink. Click the icon and copy/paste the page the page link that appears above the article.
• Click the Cite tool and scroll down to find the article's citation. Typically, business fields use either APA Style or MLA Style. Check with your instructor to see if they have a preference.